Judgment Day looms for Hillary Clinton the wrecker, London Times

They endorse Barack for hope, but fear that Hillary will play on our fears as Bush did.

From The Sunday Times of London
April 20, 2008 Andrew Sullivan

Even after all the hype, this Tuesday’s vote in Pennsylvania will be a watershed primary election. This isn’t because it could determine whether Hillary Clinton’s campaign continues on its brutal, nihilistic path towards the destruction of the most promising figure in the Democratic party since Kennedy.

It isn’t because it’s been an age since the last primary vote and every nasty toxin in American culture has been drawn to the surface by the Clinton poultice. It isn’t even because Pennsylvania is an indisputably important and large state that any Democrat needs to win in November.

It is because the Clintons have turned Pennsylvania into a microcosm of what they think the general election will be in November. And the Clintons are running as the Rove Republicans. If they fail to destroy Barack Obama as effectively as Karl Rove – Bush’s master of the dark arts – destroyed Al Gore and John Kerry in 2000 and 2004, with tactics just as brutal but even more personal, then they will have driven American politics to a critical point. They will have shown that the paradigm that has reigned in US politics for at least two decades has been shattered.

That’s what is being tested this coming week. It may be the most important vote in America until the final one in November.

For a month now, Obama has been pummelled by a Democrat in ways I have never witnessed in a primary campaign. Senator Hillary Clinton has directly argued that he is less qualified to be commander-in-chief than the Republican nominee, John McCain. She has said that she doesn’t know for sure that he is not a secret Muslim. She has said his choice of church is unacceptable to her. She has said he deliberately wants many Americans to continue scraping by without health insurance.

Her campaign has insinuated that he was once a drug dealer. Her husband has equated him with the rabble-rousing preacher Jesse Jackson. The Clintons have publicly associated Obama with domestic terrorist William Ayers, with the militant Palestinian group Hamas, and with antisemitic demagogue Louis Farrakhan. And what is remarkable about all this is that most of it was not done by surrogates, but by a former president of the United States against a senator in his own party, and directly by Clinton herself. Every time you think: “Nah, they won’t go there, will they?” – they do.

Right now, in Pennsylvania, Clinton is running only negative advertisements designed to exploit Obama’s gaffe a fortnight ago, when he described some rural Pennsylvanians as bitter, and as “clinging” to some traditional identities because they feel left out of economic and social change. It was a stupid offhand comment, easily misinterpreted, and Obama deserved a hit.

But this is what the Clintons’ actual advertisement says, voiced by several unidentified Pennsylvanians: “I was very insulted by Barack Obama.” “It shows how out of touch Barack Obama is.” “The good people of Pennsylvania deserve a lot better than what Barack Obama said.”

This is a swing state. For the Clintons baldly to coopt exactly the kind of antielitist rhetoric used to marginalise Democrats by Republicans for three decades is to take the campaign warfare to a whole new level of earth-scorching.

For good measure, the ABC News debate last Wednesday night could have been crafted by Rove. For the first three-quarters of an hour, every conceivable personal attack on Obama was aired by the moderators, including former Clinton protege, George Stephanopoulos.

Obama was asked if his failure to wear an American flag lapel pin at all times was a sign that he didn’t really love America. He was asked if he was an elitist. He was asked if he secretly condoned domestic terrorism, on the grounds that an old 1960s Weather Underground radical had sponsored a fundraiser for him. He was asked whether his former pastor, an ex-marine, was a patriot. And on each occasion, Clinton jumped in to exploit the attacks by the ABC moderators. It was so brutal and unrelenting that you almost looked away.

Obama, moreover, wilted. He didn’t punch back. He seemed completely exhausted, drained, almost detached. I’ve seen him this way before, but never before 10m viewers in prime time. It was his worst performance yet.
In one debate, all the tactics deployed by Republicans since Lee Atwater ran George Bush Sr’s guns-and-flags-and-taxes campaign in 1988 were unloaded on the rookie. Clinton grinned. The next day, her husband said she “did great”. There was almost a liberated sense in the Clinton camp that, finally, they had been able to do to a Democrat what Republicans had done to them for the past two decades: insinuate treason, lack of patriotism, elitist snobbery, countercultural deviance, and every other red-blue hot-button meme that could stroke some electoral erogenous zone somewhere.

Not since the Clintons ran radio ads in 1996, bragging that they had defended American values from homosexuals, had the adoption of pure Republican tactics been so obvious. And this time, it was against a Democrat.

This, the Clintonites tell us, is what the Republicans will do to Obama this autumn. So we’re only showing you! The strategy is to persuade super-delegates that only the Clinton brand can withstand Rove-style attacks, and so foment a revolution before or at the convention to dislodge the candidate with the most pledged delegates and the greatest number of popular votes.

They are, of course, only doing this for the sake of their party, their country and the world. That the tactic also correlates with the Clintons’ recapturing control of a party that was finally moving past them is pure coincidence.

And that’s why Tuesday will be so instructive. Hillary Clinton should win Pennsylvania easily. She had a 20-point lead until relatively recently. And if the Clintons are right about their classic Atwater-Rove tactics, she will win by double-digits after throwing the kitchen sink, the boiler, the couch and the septic tank at her opponent.

However, if Obama keeps her lead to single digits, if he goes on to win in North Carolina and Indiana, if the momentum of the race does not change, something else will be shown.

It will show that the crisis America is in now has made the kind of tactics of the past two decades moot. It will show that the issues of the Iraq occupation, the teetering economy, the unsustainable debt, the collapsing dollar, the constitutional disarray and the moral collapse of the torture programme are now more salient than cultural identity. It will show that the voters actually want to debate something more than lapel pins and who is or is not a secret Muslim or patriot. It will show we are in a new era.

Maybe we’re not. Maybe the old politics and the old patterns have one more turn of the screw to go. Maybe the Clintons are right. And that’s the beauty of democracy. On Tuesday, we will go a long way towards finding out.

ABC Debates Biased? The Reviews Are In

.. From WashPo TV critic Tom Shales:

"It was another step downward for network news -- in particular ABC News, which
hosted the debate from Philadelphia and whose usually dependable anchors,
Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, turned in shoddy, despicable
performances. For the first 52 minutes of the two-hour, commercial-crammed show,
Gibson and Stephanopoulos dwelled entirely on specious and gossipy trivia that
already has been hashed and rehashed, in the hope of getting the candidates to
claw at one another over disputes that are no longer news. Some were barely news
to begin with. The fact is, cable networks CNN and MSNBC both did better jobs
with earlier candidate debates. Also, neither of those cable networks, if memory
serves, rushed to a commercial break just five minutes into the proceedings,
after giving each candidate a tiny, token moment to make an opening statement.
Cable news is indeed taking over from network news, and merely by being
competent."

... even our friends across the pond, at the U.K.'s Guardian, were unimpressed with what they said was possibly "the
dumbest debate in America":

"Last night's debate -- or, more specifically, the performance of its
moderators, Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos -- was by turns superficial
and disingenuous. The trouble started early. Gibson began with an utterly
fatuous inquiry about whether each candidate would pledge to ask the other to be
their vice-presidential nominee if they won, and agree to accept the veep slot
if they lost ... Stephanopoulos and Gibson deserve every bit of opprobrium being
thrown their way. They delivered a noxious blend of smear, innuendo and
diversion. But it looks like the same old political junk food no longer
satisfies an electorate hungry for real change."

... Ed Morrissey says, What were you hoping for? A game of patty-cake?

"I'm not sure what anyone expected. All of the questions asked were legitimate
questions, and the time spent on them had more to do with follow-ups by the
candidates than with the moderators. None of them had been asked in a debate before last night, and
indeed most of these issues had only been reported since the last debate. ABC
didn't break a scoop last night; all of the issues they raised in that first 50
minutes have appeared in both major media outlets and in each others'
advertising."

ABC Delivers Biased Debate: Obama Answers

Before last night's ABC debate, I e-mailed some questions I would like asked. I did it for the following reasons, since the debate had become debased to the point of personal attack ads by the Clinton campaign reminiscent of the Bush campaigns... complicit with a press that was afraid to press Bush on anything. This was sent out yesterday before the debate (my e-mail), and oddly enough, the debate did exactly the opposite of what I hoped it would do. It went on the offensive of one candidate, run by a former employee of the other candidate's family. The following is what I asked, followed by Senator Obama's assessment today of last night's debate, in what I thought was very accurate. I stated as follows in my e-mail:

Attacks are using fabrications or half-truths about a candidate to divide voters and cause questions in voters minds, albeit questions fabricated by the attacker.

There is a difference between that and asking direct questions of an opponent about why they actually DID do something, or why they have certain stands on issues. That is not attacking. That is winning the political fight through discussion of issues.

Facts I'D like examined are
1) Why did Hillary support the Bush's War on Iraq when Bin Laden was in Afghanistan?
2) Why did she vote to declare the Iranian Brigade a terrorist organization, thus giving Bush the ammo to go into Iran before he leaves office?
3) Why was she the ONLY Senator (Democratic or Republican) absent from the vote on granting retroactive immunity to the telecoms?
4) Why was Mark Penn on her payroll for a full year while still consulting the Colombian government on trade and jobs? - and, concurrently, how does she feel about her husband receiving an award and large sums of money from that same Colombian government as she "professes" to oppose Nafta? And Why is Mark Penn still advising, if this is an issue?
5) Why did she work so hard to support NAFTA in the beginning?
6) Why did she vote for Bush's Federal Bankruptcy Law which made it more difficult for those with mounting credit card debts to gain bankruptcy amidst the escalation of credit card rates that approaches the usury of organized crime in decades past? (30 percent in some cases)
7) How did she feel about her ultrawealthy supporters who wrote the infamous letter to the DCCC stating that they would take their money from local campaigns if the superdelegates did not go with Hillary? And, again, concurrently, how did she feel about the ties of some of those letter writers to organizations such as Rupert Murdoch's Newscorp, which Ed Rendell now calls fair and balanced, and other groups, such as the one that sold illegal weapons to the Chinese Government, was fined, and declared bankruptcy before having to pay the U.S. Government the fine?

These are not attack points. They are checkable facts that I wish and hope the newsmedia will ask her, and that the moderators in the debate will ask her. But, given my skepticism that they won't, I hope that Senator Obama DOES check the facts on these issues, and then ask her in the debate.



What we got was an hour-long questioning of Obama on such "tough" points as: Why doesn't he wear the flag pin? (Where was Hillary's, Charlie's, and George's as they asked that question?); what about someone who was on a board with him long ago who was in the Weather Underground when he was 8, while at the same time there was no follow-up with Senator Clinton as to why she didn't feel it a problem that her husband pardoned two members of the Weather Underground?; and the re-instatement of race into the campaign by our fair friends at ABC, just as Senator Obama had delivered a wonderful speech having united the various splintered groups in this country.

And why were none of the substantial questions I, as a mere blogger, could see were factual issues that needed to be addressed?